Artist's rendering of a Masdar public square. Click to enlarge.

Looking out over the site of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, it takes some imagination to consider that this slice of hardscrabble desert will soon contain the world’s first carbon-neutral, zero-waste city. A six-metre sign at Masdar’s entrance is the only confirmation that my cab driver and I have arrived at the right place. Despite its ambitious nature, Masdar—the Arabic word for “source,” a reference to the sun—is not a household name in the region, and for the moment its seven square kilometres, demarcated by a corrugated white plastic fence, is home to little more than shrubs and debris.

It’s early December, and one of the last hot days of the year before the mild winter begins. Even at 30 degrees Celsius, today’s temperature is nothing compared to the heat of summer. Migrant labourers dressed in white lay paving stones over the sand. Some of the men wear turbans while others are in baseball caps.

Workers in boots, alternating with workers in suits, come and go from the development’s temporary headquarters, a series of white, two-level portables shaded by circus-sized canopies the colour of desert. Inside, an image framed on the wall projects the future HQ, a wavy steel and glass structure that produces more energy than it consumes.

Once complete, Masdar is supposed to be home to 50,000 residents and 1,500 companies with 40,000 people commuting daily from Abu Dhabi. At its centre is the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, a sustainable-research hub, which as of today is the only building that has started to sprout. By 2018, Masdar is meant to contain two city squares housing day-to-day activity, outside of which will lie all the infrastructure required to sustain an eco-city in a desert: solar-power plants, a waste-to-power plant, an algae farm for biofuel, a solar desalination facility, a tree nursery, and a water-treatment plant.

The form of the city—itself an experiment in sustainable design—will mirror its function, which is to develop a completely new economic sector. Masdar City is the planned home of the Masdar Initiative, a foreign direct-investment fund for renewable energy technology. The end result, its leaders hope, will be Abu Dhabi’s own version of Silicon Valley.

The irony, of course, is that the United Arab Emirates is both a massive oil exporter and produces more carbon per capita than any other nation on Earth. The Abu Dhabi government’s rhetoric is lofty—Masdar will be a “testing ground for the future of humanity,” its purpose to create “a manifesto for sustainable life”—but it’s not empty: there is money behind it. Lots of money, even with Abu Dhabi now feeling the effect of the recession that has been devastating its neighbour Dubai. Oil brought wealth to the tiny emirate only a generation ago, and leaders know the supply is limited. Masdar is an attempt to ensure future security for a newly rich people.

The timing is canny. As the scientific and political consensus has shifted from if there is a climate crisis to how severe it will be, governments, industries, and citizens are increasingly looking for action to take. While change threatens to disrupt many traditional businesses, others see the transition to a post-fossil-fuel economy as a gold rush in the making. In 2008, for the first time, investments in renewables outpaced those in traditional energy: $140 billion was invested in wind, solar, and others, compared with $110 billion for fossil fuel and nuclear. What was once the marginal turf of environmentalists is now fought over by titans of industry. (The UN predicts renewable energy could create as many as 20 million new jobs over the next decade.)

Despite the economic potential, Canadian government policy—fixated on the tar sands—has not kept pace with science. Short-term thinking, buttressed by entrenched industrial interests, has stunted innovation here. Abu Dhabi, by contrast, has kept a long view, developing a vision for a fossil-fuel-free future, and is working to realize it. The motive is self-interest, but the results have the potential to be world-changing.

Political will, of course, is easy to mobilize in a wealthy monarchy unconstrained by democracy, election cycles, or budgets. But still, in striving to wean its prosperous economy off ever-scarcer fossil fuels, the tiny Muslim territory can be seen as a microcosm for the rest of the world, and one we would do well to take a lesson from. Whether it succeeds or fails—and there are bets placed on both outcomes— the emirate knows something that Canada doesn’t seem to: you can’t build a sustainable future without a blueprint.

Arriving in Abu Dhabi, the 20-kilometre drive from the airport to the city’s centre is quick in time more than distance. People in the UAE drive fast: traffic accidents are the number one cause of death here. Brand new SUVs hurl themselves down a 10-lane desert highway that not too long ago was desert itself. The drive to Dubai takes about an hour, but anyone over 50 will recall when the trip could be made only by camel, taking three or four days.

Abu Dhabi’s history reads like a rags-to-riches screenplay: the largest of the seven independent sheikdoms that comprise the United Arab Emirates, it was a poor pearl-farming outpost for the first 60 years of the 20th century, watching from the sidelines as oil strikes elsewhere in the Persian Gulf made its neighbours rich. When Abu Dhabi’s own huge oil reserves were discovered in 1959, residents expected the new wealth would bring long-awaited modernization, but nothing happened. Crown prince Sheik Shakhbut had grown paranoid from decades of dealing with the British, who maintained a presence in the region, and hoarded the wealth in case he should need it to fight off a military threat. By the mid-1960s, the problem was obvious to all, and Shakhbut was overthrown by his youngest brother, Zayed, kicking off an overnight transformation into a modern petrocracy. The nomadic population traded palm huts for air-conditioned villas, camels were swapped for cars (though there were few roads to drive them on), and high rises sprouted. Each Abu Dhabian received at least two plots of land—one for home, another for business—and a lump-sum cash payment. For most, it was a bewildering windfall: it was not uncommon at the time to see residents unaccustomed to keeping bank accounts leaving banks with cardboard boxes full of cash on their heads.

In 1968, when Britain announced its plan to withdraw from all territories east of the Suez, Zayed—fearing the prospect of being swallowed by a larger neighbour—successfully united the region’s quarreling sheiks under the flag of a federated UAE in 1971. Abu Dhabi is the largest and richest of the emirates, holding 90 percent of the country’s oil, about 10 percent of total global reserves. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the notoriously secretive sovereign wealth fund tasked with keeping the country rich, is thought to be worth about US$350 billion.

Headquarters of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Click to enlarge.

ADIA, as the investment authority is commonly called, makes its home in a 36-storey black skyscraper with rounded edges that wouldn’t look out of place in a Star Wars movie—and it dominates the view from where I am staying. My friends’ Abu Dhabi home is a four-bedroom, four-bathroom apartment, palatial, with marble floors and high ceilings. It rents for US$50,000 per year—a bargain by Abu Dhabi standards. With the influx of Western expatriates seeking large, tax-free incomes here, demand for housing outpaces the supply.

Our 14th floor balcony looks directly onto ADIA’s five-storey, airconditioned parking garage, which is topped by a gym featuring a pool that looks like it should be filled with dollar bills—which, in a way, it is. Water in the UAE is desalinated from the Gulf: nine million tonnes of oil are used each year to turn salty water sweet. (Even so, the UAE is number three in water consumption globally— behind the U.S. and Canada.)

I pour a smaller version of the ADIA pool in my en suite bathtub and think about what’s on the other end of the water pipe. In my imagination, it’s sinister machines belching black smoke while men in robes sit around lighting shisha pipes with dollar bills—but at least they are talking about wind farms.

The truth is the sheiks are talking about oil and wind farms—and Formula One racetracks and branches of the Guggenheim designed by Frank Gehry. Along with the new economic sector represented by Masdar, Abu Dhabi is focusing on tourism, aiming to make itself the cultural centre of the Middle East. Call it bet-hedging. The emirate has a lot to lose. If Masdar is successful, it may just happen that Abu Dhabi, a latecomer to the industrial age, will be among the first out the other side.

Nicholas Parker knows something about trying to move past fossil fuel dependence. The Canadian coined the term “cleantech” eight years ago when he founded Cleantech Group, a venture capital company that specializes in technology and knowledge related to the mitigation of ecological crises. Cleantech as an investment category includes everything from energy production to wastewater management to compliance management, and today, it’s the fastest growing sector there is.

Parker sits in the backyard of his home in Toronto’s High Park neighbourhood on a sunny June day. In a sweatshirt, sandals and socks and khaki pants, he looks much more at home than in the suits his business dealings often demand. Parker comes across as generous, gregarious, and as something of a rebel.

To me, he represents the convergence of environmentalism and business that has become our best hope for progress. “I’ve always had a passion for two things: entrepreneurship—I really celebrate that—and sustainable development, social justice, the environment,” he says. “Most of my life I felt schizophrenic; my lefty friends think I’m a right-winger and my right-wing friends think I’m a hardcore revolutionary.”

Parker says he founded Cleantech to “bring the radical disruptive mentality that exists in Silicon Valley and put it at service of the major sustainability challenges of our time.” That, and he claims to be unemployable. It’s true Parker is hard to pin down. He’s a venture capitalist who hasn’t owned a car for 23 years, a lifelong Liberal—but for a dalliance with the Green Party—and a Zen Buddhist.

In his business, the stakes here are high, both financially and environmentally. “If we’re focusing on energy, this is a $6-trillion-a year industry,” says Parker, adding that no other industry gets measured with numbers close to those for power generation. By now, most people know generally what is at stake with global warming. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that Earth’s average temperature will rise somewhere in the range of 1.1 to 6.4 degrees over pre-industrial times by the end of the century. The IPCC’s overall veracity was called into question last year with the exposure of emails suggesting it used questionable sources to advance questionable claims in its groundbreaking 2007 report, but “Emailgate” aside, these warming estimates are widely believed to be conservative, as actual increases have so far outpaced projections.

Beyond two degrees Celsius, the scenarios become apocalyptic: polar ice caps melt, three-quarters of the world’s species face extinction, and rising sea levels threaten coastal settlements. As it is, we’re 0.7 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures and the carbon we’ve emitted so far has us committed to at least another 0.2 degrees. To avoid the worst, environmental scientists believe we must reduce emissions by 80 percent before 2050. The numbers don’t leave a lot of room for optimism.

Parker’s company is at the forefront of innovation in trying to keep us away from the precipice, and he says he spends a lot of time spurring competition in the race toward a greener future. “My job is to run around telling everyone they’re behind everyone else,” he explains with enthusiasm.

When it comes to the environment, Canada has chosen to lag in pretty much every way. Our Kyoto commitment was a six percent reduction below 1990 levels, but we’ve increased emissions by 22 percent since signing on. Environment Canada attributes this trend primarily to increases in fuel production for export (specifically, the Alberta tar sands), as well as new vehicles on the road and our continued reliance on coal-fired power plants. In keeping with its demonstrated priorities, government spending on clean technologies has been almost entirely earmarked for non-renewable nuclear as well as carbon capture and storage, in which emissions are captured at the source and injected into the ground—at best a technological stop-gap. The Tories’ 2010 budget committed Canada to becoming “a leader in green job creation,” but failed to back the pledge with investment in renewable energy technologies.

Canada’s approach to climate change, or lack thereof, became hard to ignore in the weeks leading up to December’s UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, and during the proceedings, where the Canadian government’s disregard for emissions reduction led to loud international scorn. (For the third year running, Canada won the “Fossil of the Year” award, presented by the Climate Change Action Network to the country that has done the most to obstruct progress on climate change.)

This country’s regressive stance means Parker doesn’t do a lot of business close to home. “Canada doesn’t have a top 10 company in any cleantech category,” he says. “That’s why I live here, and I don’t work here.”

Parker is hopeful about the future, but not convinced we will make enough progress to avoid catastrophe. “I think this is an experiment,” he says, “and it’s quite possible we’ll fail. It’s incredible to be smart enough to know we’re fucking it up and stupid enough to still be doing it—it’s an amazing thing to be a human being.”

José Etcheverry is trying to make sure we succeed. A member of the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University and president of the Canadian Renewable Energy Alliance, Etcheverry argues that a future in which all energy is derived from renewable sources is possible, if only government would wield policy to stoke innovation—not to mention the jobs it would create. “What we need to do is implement policies that make it possible for project developers to do what they do best,” says Etcheverry. “Entrepreneurs are by definition very creative and what we are missing is the political will to open market possibilities and create policies that give people the will to invest.”

This is what Abu Dhabi is trying to do, and it’s hardly a new idea. Denmark currently derives 19 percent of its energy from wind, thanks to an aggressive policy of government incentives implemented in the 1970s, spurred by the energy crisis. The windswept nation used to get 90 percent of its energy from petroleum sources, and the transition was pure self-defence. Today, Denmark is an energy exporter, and has reduced its carbon emissions by 13 percent since 1990.

John M. R. Stone is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University and until recently was on the bureau of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Opportunities here are abundant, he says, but Canada has not stepped up. “We’ve got a prime minister who doesn’t want to tackle this issue, who would prefer if it simply went away,” says Stone. “And the main reason is because he doesn’t know how to square it with the development in the tar sands. It’s unimaginative.”

Parker says there’s no shortage of imagination: researchers have shown that, theoretically, the planet’s total energy needs could be met with solar arrays covering around four percent of the world’s desert (if it were one plot of land, it would be about the size of the Gobi). “You can make deserts into valuable land,” says Parker, “leave the lights on all night, and it won’t matter, if we get this right. We’re five years, maybe 10, from solar being cost competitive from baseload fossil fuel power, so why aren’t we pursuing it?”

In a plush-seated auditorium in Abu Dhabi’s Chamber of Commerce, Masdar’s leaders are gathered for a specific, important purpose: to convince local businesspeople to sign up for the ecocity’s vision. They are having trouble sourcing materials and labour locally due to the stringent green standards inherent in the project. For local companies—providers of everything from lighting systems to floor finishings to roofs—to do business with Masdar, they must first green their own supply chains, rising to the same environmental and ethical standard Masdar has set for itself.

Masdar City is planned to be 99 percent carbon-free, with the remaining one percent (of what a comparably sized community would emit) offset or stored. The city is being constructed using the World Wildlife Fund’s One Planet Living principles, which include zero-carbon and zero waste, as well as sustainable transport, sustainable water and local food.

The WWF initiative began as a public relations campaign designed to communicate the ecological consequences of overconsumption. By 2035, the WWF figured, Earth’s residents would require a second planet, having exhausted the resources of the first. Its involvement in Masdar, however, goes beyond cheerleading. One Planet Living also acts as an accreditation system. Each principle of sustainability is a target that a project must meet in order to get WWF’s seal of approval. According to WWF, Masdar City goes beyond their expectations.

But even with all the political will and money in the world, people need to be convinced that the change is worth the risk.

At the chamber of commerce, a row of men in flowing white dishdashas take turns speaking, introducing Masdar and its aims in an effort to win the attendees to their view. There is interest—the 400-seat room is more than half full—but this is not an easy sell. Sultan Ahmed al Jaber, CEO of Masdar, lectures to the crowd, his talking points jargon-filled and clearly well-rehearsed. “We are going to direct you. But you must look for opportunities and solutions around the world. Contribute to the knowledge transfer, the making of a knowledge economy. You as the private sector have a major role to play. Don’t underestimate your contribution; the opportunity here is huge. The project we are working on now is a paradigm shift. You must be aggressive.”

But the people who have gathered here are still a few chapters back, and with good reason. This, after all, is a city that doesn’t even have a recycling program. “Why is Masdar next to the airport?” asks the first person to stand up. (He is reassured the development is not under any flight path.) Other questions range from how multicultural the city will be to how fast carbon neutrality can realistically be achieved. A cynical comment gets al Jaber back on his feet, full of fight. “We need to make a choice,” he says, fiercely. “We can do what we usually do—sit in the passenger seat and have others develop the technology and sell it to us. Or, we can take that pioneering and become owners of intellectual property and shop it around the world. Which one would you choose?”

As far as al Jaber is concerned, the choice is made, and the big-picture elements are well under way. The Masdar Initiative’s $250-million venture capital fund has invested in about a dozen early-stage companies around the world. One is Atlanta-based EnerTech, which does waste-to-energy conversion. Since coming on board with Masdar as a small shop, it’s signed a contract with the city of Los Angeles, and could end up meeting as much as 20 percent of L.A.’s energy needs through the conversion of septic sludge. (The process is called SlurryCarb, and it works by using heat and pressure to mimic the natural processes that turn once-living materials to fossil fuel.) Masdar also has high-profile investments in projects such as London Array, the world’s largest offshore wind farm.

As an idea, Masdar is irresistible. It’s compelling, the thought of a green utopia springing forth from the desert within the world’s biggest polluter, funded by the oil money of far-sighted sheiks trying to diversify away from a diminishing and damaging resource. And it’s still early enough that Masdar is a blank canvas on which everyone involved can project their fondest hopes.

Gerard Evanden sits overlooking the Thames at a small round table in the Foster and Partners London offices. Evenden, a stylish fortysomething with spiky salt-and-pepper hair, is lead architect for Masdar City. The architectural firm founded by celebrated British architect Lord Norman Foster is a pioneer in sustainable design—the firm renovated Germany’s Reichstag, the world’s first energy-positive parliament building—but Masdar is their biggest project yet, a chance to engineer a complete city from scratch.

Evenden shows me slides illustrating Foster’s vision: pedestrian walkways elevated seven metres off the ground, with driverless electric taxis bustling below and monorails gliding overhead. According to the plan, no resident will ever be more than 150 metres from emissions-free public transit.

“It’s not just about providing power for buildings and it’s not just about collecting energy,” Evenden says. “It’s about everything from the research through to the way people live, through to the way people move.” Evenden believes Masdar is the most important project in the world right now, and for this team of architects, it’s a dream come true.

Others, however, think of it more as a pipe dream. Christopher Davidson is a fellow at the Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Durham University in the U.K., who studies the UAE, and has published numerous books on the region. He points out the political dimensions to Abu Dhabi’s motives. As a monarchy, he says, Abu Dhabi continuously needs to prove itself legitimate. “Abu Dhabi in the past couple of years has hit on a fantastic new legitimacy resource, which is championing the environment,” says Davidson. “It’s political and economic. Anyone who claims that Abu Dhabi can diversify away from oil and all related industries is living in a dream cloud. That’s just not accurate.”

But that doesn’t mean its leaders can’t have it both ways. “Despite the titillation we may feel over Abu Dhabi, a massive oil exporter, doing this, once we get over that irony, I think what we can see is a great initiative,” Davidson continues. “They’ve seized on a great opportunity, and in the long term, they might become an international hub for environmental industry.”

When I reach John Stone on the phone, he has just come from a meeting at Parliament in Ottawa—a gathering of a conservation caucus that brings together MPs with scientists and members of NGOs to talk about environmental issues. “They even listened to me,” he jokes.

Stone points out that it’s possible now, with existing technology, to rapidly move to a low-carbon future, and questions why we in Canada are not doing just that. “We should be working as hard as we can toward a new energy system that is carbon free, if possible,” says Stone. “And we have the technologies that we need already: photovoltaics, solar thermal, wind and the like. We basically know what we need to do. We just need to go on and do it.”

Despite the federal government’s foot-dragging, there’s more hope at the regional level. Etcheverry calls Ontario’s energy legislation the most progressive on the continent: the Green Energy Act of May 2009 is the first in North America to mandate feed-in tariffs, compelling electricity utilities to pay renewable energy providers at a premium rate. The law makes it possible for every home, office building, or neighbourhood to produce renewable energy and guarantees a market to sell it. Such a system currently provides 12.5 percent of Germany’s electricity, and adds about $2.20 to the average German home’s monthly energy bill. Solar City, a development in Freiburg, Germany, produces all its own electricity from solar arrays (in one of the cloudiest spots in Europe) and sells the surplus into the grid. A combination energy plant in Kassel, Germany, sells wind and solar power, and switches on biogas combustion to meet peak demand. Based on the Combined Power Plant, German scientists believe that country could be powered entirely with renewables within 40 years.

“It’s very difficult to make a quantum leap if you’re stepping into the unknown,” says Etcheverry about imagining a different future. “For me it’s easy. I have solar power in my own house, and have seen what others have done, and what we could do if we got our collective act together.”

Currently, nearly 60 percent of Canada’s grid is powered by a renewable source: hydro. Other renewables are a tiny 0.5 percent, with the balance coming from coal, natural gas and nuclear. According to world average numbers from the Canadian Renewable Energy Alliance, coal is still the least expensive power source at four to seven cents per kilowatt hour. Wind comes in second at six to nine cents, followed by nuclear at 10 to 13 cents (CanREA factored building-cost overruns into its equation). Expensive carbon capture and storage facilities, which are key to “cleaner coal” schemes, will soon push the price of coal above 12 cents per kWh. The prices for solar and coal are expected to meet within the decade.

Traditional problems with renewables—only being able to produce power when the sun shines or the wind blows—still pose challenges. The most compelling fix is to reconfigure the energy grid as a two-way, distributed system linking together many different types of generation facilities. The same redundancy and flexibility is what makes the internet possible: when one node fails, others pick up the slack. The electricity equivalent, advocates say, would be greener, more efficient, and more resilient.

But business as usual is tempting. It’s easier, for one, and there is still a lot of money to extract from the ground. North America is sitting on a lot of coal—probably enough to last at least 300 years, if we don’t mind tearing mountaintops off to get it. Oil has maybe 100 years; accessible uranium, 40. But climate change is the real catalyst for developing alternatives. From an ecological perspective, diminishing oil stocks are irrelevant. “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones,” quips Stone, “and the oil age is not going to end because we’ve run out of oil.”

When it comes to energy and climate change, the path forward is as fundamentally uncomplicated as it is urgent. It’s last call for the oil age. The only question now is, how long until we kick the old drunk out of the bar?

Artist's rendering of the completed Masdar City development. Click to enlarge.

A sign at the entrance to the Masdar site dwarfs everything around it. At its top is an aerial illustration of what the city will look like on completion. The rest of it lists the various businesses that are partnering to make it happen.

Masdar’s associates undoubtedly feel good about the project’s noble cause, but the sign would be empty if these companies weren’t making money. The Masdar Initiative is a business: the city is intended to be a magnet for foreign investment, the eventual home of 1,500 companies looking to profit from clean technology. The physical city is one big carbon offset project, generating carbon credits that will be sold on international markets. There is no ambiguity: the motive here is financial; environmental benefits are a bonus. Regardless of the reason for its existence, the Masdar Initiative shows what clearly defined policy and political leadership can do.

Through its two facets, the city and the initiative, Masdar shows that climate change is both an individual problem and a macro one, and that the best tool for change is policy. The city, with its emphasis on living lightly, while retaining a high standard of living, shows what individuals—in intelligently planned surroundings—can do. The initiative is political and economic, creating an environment favourable to the pursuit of alternatives.

There are politicians in Canada who have attempted, in smaller ways, to use policy to fight climate change. Stéphane Dion wanted to put a price on carbon to reduce emissions, but his Green Shift plan—centred on a carbon tax—failed to connect with voters. Similarly, B.C. premier Gordon Campbell did not come away unscathed after implementing a revenue-neutral carbon tax. The public knee jerks at the mention of the word “tax,” but just as there is consensus among scientists that humans are changing the climate, economists are in agreement that carbon pricing is essential if we are serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Before the October 2008 federal election, 230 of Canada’s leading economists from universities across the country signed an open letter to the federal parties urging a coherent economic plan to combat climate change. “In the absence of policy, individuals generally don’t take the environmental consequences of their actions into account, and the result is a ‘market failure’ and excessive levels of pollution,” reads the letter, which goes on to warn: “Even those who are not convinced by today’s scientific evidence need to consider the costs of not acting now. Any action (including inaction) will have substantial economic consequences and, thus, economics lies at the heart of the debate on climate change.”

Industrialization produced the emissions that threaten the climate balance, and moving to a low-carbon society must also largely be driven by economics. Yale University economist William Nordhaus believes that all the conflict and contortions of 2009’s Copenhagen summit, and the next round of wrangling scheduled for November 2010 in Cancún, Mexico, could be avoided if the world could simply agree on a price for carbon. He told a pre-Copenhagen conference that “to bet the world’s climate system on the Kyoto approach is a reckless gamble. Taxation is a proven instrument. Taxes may be unpopular, but they work. The Kyoto model is largely untested and the experience we have tells us it will not meet our objective—to stabilize the world climate system.”

The threat to polar bears may not stir their consciences, but slashand-burn capitalists will respond to threats to their pocketbooks: Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, projected in 2006 that investing one percent of global GDP in emission-reduction measures would spare the world an economic contraction of as much as 20 percent this century. As an investment, that’s a winner. (Two years later, Stern has revised his figure to two percent because climate change is progressing more rapidly than anticipated.)

The first evacuations directly attributable to man-made climate change occurred in 2009 in the Carteret Islands in the South Pacific without much fanfare. If we were paying more attention to such evidence, we would be sprinting toward a clean energy future. Instead, we have been sauntering. As people have discovered there’s money to be made, it’s picked up to a jog. As Parker says, “We’re learning. But the problem is that the situation is deteriorating faster than we’re learning.” Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the economics favour action. “The longer we delay,” says Stone, “the graver the threat, and the more expensive it will be to address.”

There are lessons to be learned from the desert, and they are familiar ones. We’ve mustered political will for important things before. “Other prime ministers have said we will have railroads that will connect the country from coast to coast,” says Etcheverry. “We will have public health care, we will have a Canadian broadcasting corporation, and so on. The big 21st century Canadian project is making our country a generator of clean power, truly clean power. And it could make us rich in the process.”

Gwyneth Cravens. Illustration by David Anderson.

Novelist, journalist, and former anti-nuclear activist Gwyneth Cravens spent 10 years researching and writing Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy. She tells us why she now favours nuclear.

This: How did you become an advocate for nuclear power?

Cravens: Through my good friend Rip Anderson, a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. He’s one of the world’s experts on nuclear waste and risk assessment as well as being an environmental activist. One day I started asking him about nuclear power, which he supports as a source of energy. He helped me sort out the myths I had assimilated from my ban-the-bomb days. I came to realize he was right.

This: I assume you, like many of us, had equated nuclear power with nuclear destruction.

Cravens: The word nuclear makes us jittery. We associate it with the end of the world. But the end of the world is called something else—global warming—and, ironically, nuclear power is one of the ways to prevent that from happening.

This: You target coal and natural gas as the sources of energy we should be protesting against. What are your arguments against coal-fired plants?

Cravens: In the U.S. alone, some 24,000 people a year die prematurely because of coal pollution. Hundreds of thousands more suffer heart and lung problems. There are no deaths among the American public attributable to commercial nuclear power. Radiation can’t escape through the reactor containment building of a nuclear plant. Those walls are five or six feet thick and made from special concrete.

This: I was startled by a comparison you made between the waste generated by a coal-fired plant and that from a nuclear one.

Cravens: In France they get almost 80 per cent of their electricity from nuclear power and they reprocess it, unlike in the U.S. As a result, over 20 years, a family of four in France would produce an amount of waste tinier in volume than a small cigarette lighter. If you got all your electricity from coal-fired plants your individual lifetime share of solid waste would be about 68 tons. You’d also be responsible for 77 tons of global-heating carbon dioxide. There’s no combustion going on in nuclear plants, so they don’t release greenhouse gases.

This: How are hydroelectric dams a problem?

Cravens: Dam failures certainly kill fewer people worldwide than fossil-fuel pollution—it kills 3 million people a year. Dams are an important source of low-carbon electricity and we need them. But in terms of risk, dam failures are far more of a threat to people and wildlife than nuclear plants. This: Don’t the events at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl suggest nuclear plants aren’t safe?

Cravens: The Three Mile Island meltdown and its by-products were contained. The evacuation was due to a misreading of data and was totally unnecessary. Chernobyl was a stupid, horrible accident that was entirely preventable. The reactor had virtually no containment. If it had, Chernobyl would have been no worse than Three Mile Island. We have no plants of that design in North America.

This: How have your friends and colleagues reacted to your book?

Cravens: Many were skeptical when I started the project. But to a person they have all said that after they read the book they changed their minds about nuclear power.

This: Do you have any doubts that nuclear is a safe source of power?

Cravens: Nothing is totally safe. But this comes close. Studies have shown that cancer is no more prevalent around nuclear plants than anywhere else. In the U.S., 73 percent of emissions-free electricity comes from nuclear. If we want to reduce greenhouse gases, nuclear power is necessary. Fundamentally, to me, my book is about confronting prejudice—my own and that of others—toward nuclear power. To learn I was wrong about it was a very liberating experience.

Unlike oil spills, which produce sensational images of oil-covered ducks, uranium tailings spills are under-reported and quietly insidious. Here are some of the stories you might have missed:

Elliott Lake, Canada

Spill: Accidental. In August of 1993 a power failure at the Rio Algom’s Stanleigh mine allowed uranium tailings to spill into McCabe Lake and contaminate the water source.
Contamination: Two million litres of tailings entered McCabe Lake.
Effects: Tailing spills had devastated 90 kilometres of the Serpent River by the late 1970s. The Serpent River First Nations indigenous territory is thoroughly contaminated with radioactive waste.
Punishment or resolution: The Atomic Energy Control Board of Canada charged Rio Algom with one count of failure to provide proper training for employees, and one count of failure to prevent a spill. The mine has been decommissioned.

Mailuu-Suu, Kyrgyzstan

Spill: Pending. Kyrgyzstan was one of the primary sources of uranium for the U.S.S.R.’s Cold War arms race. Two million tonnes of toxic waste sits in 23 open pits around Mailuu-Suu. The tailings sit atop a mountainous fault line, making a toxic disaster nearly inevitable.
Contamination: In 2005, a landslide caused 300,000 cubic metres of material to spill into the Mailuu-Suu river, dangerously close to one of the tailing piles. The Mailuu-Suu river connects to water sources for civilians in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
Effects: Over 23,000 people are at immediate risk of overexposure to radon, with a potential risk for millions. Some cancer rates in the area are twice as high as the national average.
Punishment or resolution: None. In 2008 The Kyrgyz government created a special agency to deal with the cleanup of the tailings with the help of NATO and the World Bank, but to date little progress has been made.

Mounana , Gabon

Spill: Intentional. During 40 years of uranium mining in this former colony, French nuclear giant Cogéma opted to dump radioactive tailings into Ngamaboungou creek, polluting Mounana’s water supply.
Contamination: More than two million tonnes of uranium tailings were disposed of in the Ngamaboungou river valley.
Effects: To date the only data on the impact of tailings disposal is from Cogéma itself, who claim there was no real impact. Cogéma calculated that area residents, however, are exposed nearly three times the international guidelines for occupational exposure.
Punishment or resolution: None.

Kakadu, Australia

Spill: Accidental, repetitive.
Contamination: Over the course of its lifetime, the Ranger uranium mine in Northern Australia has released over 2000 cubic metres of contaminated water into the wetland and waterways surrounding Kakadu National Park. A trucking accident near the mine earlier this year spilled 17,000 litres of sulphuric acid into the wetlands—the largest chemical spill in local history.
Effects: Uranium levels in the nearby Corridor Creek are now 4,000 times the recommended drinking water standard. One recent government study found cancer rates among the Aboriginal population in the Kakadu region are twice as high as those living elsewhere.
Punishment or resolution: Ineffective. The Ranger mine has been repeatedly fined for failing to meet standard regulations, between $82,500 and $150,000 per incident. But tailing breaches continue to occur.

Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, became a convert to nuclear power during a visit with James Lovelock, considered by many to be the godfather of the environmental movement. During a day spent strolling through the fields around Lovelock’s home, the two spoke of many things, but returned again and again to nuclear energy, which Lovelock insisted was the only way to prevent catastrophic global warming.

Nuclear power: such a bright idea?

For Moore, it was not an easy argument to swallow. Like many in the first generation of the environmental movement, he’d cut his teeth protesting nuclear power and nuclear weapons. “Next to nuclear warheads themselves,” he once said, nuclear power plants were “the most dangerous devices that man has ever created.”

But he had to pay attention. This was James Lovelock, the man who had created the Gaia hypothesis—the idea that the Earth is essentially a living creature—and whose research laid the ground for Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, without which there might not have been an environmental movement. And he supported nuclear power?

As Moore listened, and Lovelock argued, he started to see why. Other than hydroelectric, what had done more to keep carbon emissions from skyrocketing? It wasn’t wind, it wasn’t solar, and it wasn’t hybrids—it was nuclear power. Without the electricity it had produced since the 1960s, global warming would have progressed much further, Lovelock argued, perhaps already passing a point of no return.

Moore became a convert. At first, some former colleagues chalked it up to greed—he has since worked as a consultant for nuclear power associations—but they soon discovered he was far from alone. Included in the ranks of pro-nuclear environmentalists are the likes of Steward Brand, founder of Whole Earth Catalog; Bishop Hugh Montefiore, a former longtime trustee for Friends of the Earth; Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel; as well as a host of others grouped under the umbrella organization Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy. Their message is simple: climate change cannot be stopped without more use of nuclear power.

In Canada, it seems, the message is starting to resonate. A new nuclear facility is planned for Ontario and potential for a second is being evaluated New Brunswick, while Saskatchewan and Alberta are both considering building their first nuclear power plants. In terms of carbon dioxide emissions, the result would be staggering: Canada could get nearly halfway toward its Kyoto obligations by doubling its nuclear portfolio. But are new nuclear plants the only way out? Are they worth the risk? And have we really entered an era when being pro-environment might also mean being pro-nuclear?

Not long ago, the idea would have been absurd. Thanks to aggressive lobbying, mostly by progressive organizations, nuclear power looked bound for the scrap heap. In Ontario, home to most of the countrys nuclear power plants, Bob Rae’s NDP government had banned the construction of new nuclear facilities, leaving coal plants to fill the gap instead of maintaining existing nuclear stations. South of the border, no reactors had come online for more than a decade.

At first, global warming changed none of this. Fresh from successful battles against acid rain and the ozone hole, there was even reason for optimism among environmentalists. But as carbon emissions continued to rise and Kyoto Protocol targets fell by the wayside, it became clear that halting the growth of greenhouse gases would not be so easy: beyond the ever-growing number of cars on the streets and the meagre success of well-intentioned conservation efforts, there was the fact that most of the world, Canada included, was hooked on fossil fuels for electricity generation. And there are no quick fixes.

“We’ve tapped out hydro in this country,” says Steve Aplin, Vice President of Energy and Environment with HDP Group, an Ottawa-based management consultancy whose former clients include the Ontario Power Workers Union. Aplin, who runs a blog on Canadian energy issues, points to the Albany River, considered Ontario’s most viable undeveloped hydro site, as a perfect example of whats left: the river drops so gradually that damming it would flood large areas upstream—some of it First Nations territory. It could be done, but it would be expensive, politically untenable, and environmentally disastrous. And the gains would be slight—a few hundred megawatts at most, equivalent to one nuclear reactor like Pickering or a small coal-fired plant.

“Plug-in hybrids are going to be featured on the roads within 10 or 15 years,” Aplin adds. “If that’s happening, then we need an increase in generating capacity.” The same goes for geothermal heat pumps and tankless hot water heaters, the two most promising sources of CO₂-free heating. They burn no natural gas, but can in some cases require much more electricity than conventional furnaces and hot-water tanks. In other words, even after conservation and improvements in efficiency, the future will require more electricity, not less. Together, three sectors—transportation, electricity, and heating—account for most of Canada’s emissions, but none can be addressed without a clean source of electricity. There are only three choices: wind, solar, or nuclear. Deciding what it will be has become one of the most important environmental questions of our time.

Whenever a new nuclear facility is planned, many people ask, why not just build wind turbines instead? The question seems so obvious, in part because it seems like the rest of the world is outpacing Canada on this front: just last year, for instance, Spain generated 40 percent of its electricity from wind power on a particularly breezy day. So why not us?

To answer that question, you just need to take a stroll to one of Canada’s most prominent wind turbines, located on the shores of Lake Ontario. This lone turbine sits not far from downtown Toronto, and isolated as it is, it should be an incredible comfort to a city where the smog is often thick enough to taste. But on those days— when heat and humidity trap smog, when tons of coal are shovelled into the furnace to power millions of AC units cranked to max—youd be lucky to see the blades make a single turn.

The shores of Lake Ontario, unfortunately, are just not all that windy—they produce, on average, Class 2 wind, which may sound quite good, but is actually the second lowest on the scale used to rate wind-power sites. (Compare that to northern Texas, home to North Americas largest wind farms, where the wind almost always blows at Class 4, often rising to Class 5.) Torontos turbine still produces electricity, and in educational terms, it’s an unqualified success: quiet, attractive, and no piles of bird carcasses at its base. But it does hint at the challenge facing wind power, especially in Canada: our best wind resources are simply not where most of us live.

“All this new wind requires transmission,” Aplin explains. “That’s not just expensive; it’s difficult. [Power companies] have to buy rights-of-way from property owners all along the route of those lines.” Such rights of way are costly at the best of times, but it can be crippling in places like Ontario, where the best onshore wind sites also happen to be the best places to put million-dollar cottages. And these Ontario sites are only moderately good. The best sites—off the coast of B.C. and Labrador, and on the Gaspé Peninsula—all happen to be in provinces that already get almost all their power from hydroelectricity. To connect them to hydro-poor provinces would require thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines.

“And what do you get when you put in all that effort, and pay for all of that?” ask Aplin. “You’ve got intermittent power, which you still need to back up.” It’s this need for backup that is proving to be the true undoing of both wind and solar power. While the technology continues to improve, the simple problem remains that if the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine, the power doesn’t flow.

To illustrate this problem, Aplin checks another website he is developing, which provides real-time tracking of power production.

“Right now weve got close to 900 MW of wind power installed in Ontario,” he says, clicking a link. “If you look at the output from just today, well, at 2 oclock this morning, wind was putting out 310 MW of electricity, then at 3 o’clock it dropped to 268, and then at 4 oclock it went back up to 309.”

Fluctuations aside, it’s hard not to notice the gap between capacity and actual production. Unlike a 900MW coal plant, which will produce pretty close to that amount, a wind system only produces maximum power if every turbine receives peak wind, all at the same time. Needless to say, that never happens. To guarantee 900 MW of power from wind, every hour of every day, something closer to 2,700 MW of turbines would need to be built—an expensive proposition at a base price of $2.2 million per megawatt, not including the cost of buying land and laying new power lines.

And this is a small problem compared to those fluctuations. Forty-two MW is no big deal, but how about 420, or 4,200? It’s a lesson the residents of northern Texas learned the hard way last February, when a sudden drop in wind weakened energy supplies so badly that the state had turn off the lights on non-essential customers to prevent rolling blackouts. And this is in a place that gets less than 10 percent of its energy from wind.

Batteries seem like the obvious solution, but they remain much, much too expensive: the best on the market costs $3.7 million and provides just enough backup to power a few city blocks—about 500 homes—for seven hours. That’s why the only real solution at the moment is buying power elsewhere, or using coal or natural gas as a backup. In fact, big wind-power success stories like Spain and Germany are heavily dependent on both— and ironically, a lot of the power they buy comes from Frances nuclear reactors.

Canada has no France to fall back on—the closest we have is Hydro-Québec. All plans to phase out nuclear power call on provinces to buy more power from HydroQuébec. But “Hydro-Québec makes a killing selling power into New England,” Aplin notes. If the rest of Canada wants their electricity, we’d have to match their prices. “No one is going to do that.”

That leaves using natural gas as a backup. In fact, many plans to phase out nuclear plants, in Canada and elsewhere, involve building redundant gas-fired generators to use when the wind falls off, or when the sun doesn’t shine. Conservative estimates are that natural gas emits only about 35 percent less CO₂ than modern coal plants, so calling it cleaner is a bit like trading in your Hummer for a pickup truck. Moreover, it makes the grid even more captive to oil companies and commodity speculators.

“So why not just add to your existing nuclear stations?” Aplin asks. The question is fair enough, given the benefits of doing just that: two of Ontario’s three stations— Darlington and Bruce—as well as New Brunswick’s Point Lepreau, all have enough room to increase the number of reactors on-site. This one change would all but eliminate CO₂ from electricity production, allowing Canada to realize the full benefits of plug-in hybrid cars and other substitutes for fossil fuels. So why not?

One word: Chernobyl. The catastrophic meltdown of the Soviet reactor in 1986 continues to weigh on minds today. In Canada, it is the basis for a website and Facebook group called 30km.ca, which uses the Chernobyl evacuation zone to show what would happen if the Pickering reactor went up in a similar way. It is promoted by a mock newscast on YouTube, where the anchor talks about “widespread chaos,” “mass exodus,” and “a cloud of nuclear fallout not seen since the Chernobyl disaster,” before the screen abruptly shifts to a test pattern, stopping the announcer mid-sentence. On related sites discussion boards, it’s clear that the threat weighs heavily in many minds: “at least wind power wont melt my face” reads one post, while another, echoing Moore’s early statement, claims nuclear “will be the end of the human race one day.” While no residents near Chernobyl had their faces melted—that can only be caused by extreme gamma and neutron radiation right after an atomic bomb blast—the comments do show how Chernobyl remains the ultimate deal breaker. If there is a chance—any chance—that it could happen here, the nuclear option is off the table. Period. But could it really happen?

It was a question asked by a team of scientists, including Nobel laureates, after the incident—Western governments were worried about the same thing, given the large number of reactors close to population centres. Among other tests, the scientists modelled the size of the explosion to see if would have been held by the containment structures that surround North American reactors.

These containment structures are seldom talked about, but they mark a big difference between Chernobyl and most other reactors. Chernobyl was essentially a nuclear reactor with a low-rise office building perched on top. When it blew, there was nothing between the radioactive cloud and the population. In contrast, North American reactors are surrounded by steel-lined, prestressed, reinforced concrete walls over a metre thick. The panel studying Chernobyl found that even under the Chernobyl scenario—impossible in non-Russian reactor designs anyway—this wall would contain any explosion. The U.S. military decided it wanted to be sure, and in typical Pentagon fashion, flew an F-4 fighter jet into such a wall at almost 800 kilometres an hour. The result? The jet disintegrated on impact. The wall, on the other hand, sustained a six-inch dent. Theres a reason bomb shelters are made of the same material.

“Post-[Chernobyl] accident analyses indicate that if there had been U.S.-style containment, probably none of the radioactivity would have escaped, and there would have been no injuries or deaths,” notes Bernard Cohen, a professor of physics at the University of Pittsburg who studied the disaster extensively.

In fact, far from a Chernobyl, the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island revealed what happens when an accident occurs in a non-Soviet reactor. The outer container was not even required: the partially melted core was held in the primary container surrounding the core, exposing plant workers to a small increase of radiation—the equivalent of a few additional X-rays—with exposure outside the plant not even reaching the level of a typical dental exam. There were no deaths.

Not ideal, but certainly less tragic than your average plane crash. More like a parking lot fender-bender. And just as it would be foolish to slap an “Apocalypse Averted” headline onto every non-fatal accident, it is unfair to exaggerate what happened at Three Mile Island. Cars are designed to withstand accidents. Thankfully, outside of the former Soviet Union, so are nuclear power plants. Yet a lot of opposition to nuclear power continues to raise the spectre of Chernobyl. Just last year, for instance, Greenpeace activists staged a “die-in” on the streets of Toronto with mock rescue workers treating radiation-sickened survivors of a Pickering explosion. While these tactics undoubtedly have an effect, it is probably growing more and more limited. After all, the fact that Pickering will not explode is more or less common sense: if a catastrophic meltdown was really possible, would successive governments, of every political stripe, allow thousands of motorists to drive by the reactors each day on Highway 401 or, for that matter, allow millions of citizens to live just a few kilometres away? It is easy to believe that a corrupt, totalitarian regime would do so, but not a government so obsessed with safety that today, every Ontario family must stick their children in special car seats until they turn seven.

That’s why for many citizens, the worry isn’t a meltdown—it’s the effect of low-level radiation and nuclear waste. This is a much more reasonable concern, because every year thousands of people worldwide will die from inhaling radioactive isotopes—atoms that have the “wrong” number of neutrons, making them unbalanced and likely to fall apart, damaging living tissue and sometimes leading to cancer. This may sound like a damning indictment of nuclear power plants, but it’s actually a damning indictment of going into your own basement: radon gas, produced by natural radioactive substances in soil, is found in almost every house. Every Canadian is exposed to radon to some degree, and it accounts for half of all the radiation were exposed to in our lifetime. But only a tiny percentage of us—a few hundred Canadians a year—will experience negative effects from it. In contrast, one-tenth of one percent of the radiation were exposed to in our lifetimes is attributable to nuclear power. Simple math demonstrates how low the risk is. Cancer patients are routinely exposed to far, far more radiation than the workers were at Three Mile Island.

But the dire warnings continue. A Greenpeace report released a few years ago said there were so many radioactive particles in the air around the Pickering and Darlington nuclear stations that young children and pregnant women should not live within 10 kilometres, and no one should eat fruits or vegetables grown nearby. To Greenpeace’s credit, it is true that a small number of studies, mainly from Britain and Germany, have found small increases in the rate of childhood leukemia and thyroid cancer among people who live near nuclear power plants. But it is also true that many more studies have found no effects, and some have actually found lower rates of cancer near nuclear power plants.

The problem is that cancers such as childhood leukemia and thyroid cancer are already so rare—in Canada, 5 and 12 in 100,000 respectively—that the statistics are unreliable. A handful of cases in any given sample could double the number, or just as easily halve it. Moreover, when cancer cases appear to increase, it usually just means weve gotten better at spotting them (the Journal of the American Medical Association recently published a study attributing all increases in thyroid cancer rates to improved diagnosis).

Nevertheless, provincial authorities wanted a better test, especially in the face of Greenpeaces warning. In Darlington, the municipal health authority took a novel approach. Instead of just looking at rates of thyroid cancer and leukemia, they looked at all cancers. If the nuclear power plant was causing the cancer, you’d expect to see a pattern—increases in leukemia and thyroid cancers, small increases with other cancers loosely associated with radiation, and no increases in cancers that researchers knew were not caused by radiation.

They didn’t find that pattern. Their results “did not indicate a pattern to suggest that the Pickering NGS and the Darlington NGS were causing health effects in the population.” What’s more, when they compared their results to a control group—an area of Ontario with no nuclear power plants—they found an equally random pattern. It’s easy—intuitive, even—to blame nuclear power plants for health ills because they are so large and visible, but the reality is simply far more complex.

Yet many still dislike nuclear power, almost instinctively. Part of the reason undoubtedly has to do with its complexity. But passenger jets are also complex, and millions of us board them every day, despite the fact that statistically they are far more likely to kill us. Rationally, we know the thin aluminum shell can’t protect us from a crash, there aren’t any parachutes, and the thing is filled to the brim with highly flammable jet fuel. Nuclear power plants, in comparison, have walls more than a metre thick, multiple containment and safety systems, and emergency shutdown devices. They’re also less vulnerable to random flocks of geese. Yet we don’t trust nuclear power plants, and we do trust airplanes. Why?

The nuclear industry must take a lot of the blame here. It has operated behind closed doors for decades, failing to report problems that do occur and insulting the intelligence of the public with advertising that shows blue skies and children frolicking in fields of flowers, rather than levelling with us: this is complicated technology and it can be dangerous if not properly regulated, but here’s why you are safe, and here’s the absolutely staggering benefits of this sort of power. But instead, their PR has treated the public either as complete naifs or as opponents to be defeated, not as a constituency to serve.

Interestingly, France has taken a different approach. “Theres a famous story of an executive with [French nuclear giant] Areva who was having a meeting with locals who were concerned about radiation,” recalls Aplin. “She got them a bunch of radiation detection devices, and said, Here’s how to use them. Go up to the site, turn on the detectors, and wander around the site and tell me what you find. That’s what they did, and they found nothing that different from the background radiation.”

That sort of openness leads to confidence, which is why France has chosen nuclear power. In Canada, the story has been very different: just last December, there were two minor leaks at the medical-isotope-producing reactor at Chalk River—yet despite repeated calls from reporters, the leaks were not confirmed until late January. Although Atomic Energy Canada Ltd. and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission are now reporting every incident, of any size, the public and media can’t help but wonder: if they seem to be hiding minor incidents, what else could they be covering up?

But if the nuclear industry is to blame, so are some environmental groups: not for opposing nuclear power—everyone has a right to do that, and to their credit, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and others have written proposals outlining how we could stop using coal and nuclear power (but not natural gas). Reasonable people can talk seriously about how realistic those plans are: how much they cost, how soon they can be accomplished, and whether the assumptions they make, about everything from importing Quebec hydro to changing human behaviour, are really realistic, especially given the short time frame to deal with climate change. This is a legitimate debate.

What is not legitimate is constantly raising the spectre of a “Canadian Chernobyl,” or claiming that a small uptick in a rare form of cancer is conclusive proof of the danger of nuclear energy. It just isn’t.

In the end, all of this back and forth may prove to be of little consequence because there are deeper forces in human psychology that are pushing us back toward nuclear power. The ultimate reason we get on the airplane is not only that we trust the pilots—it is also because there is a significant benefit to doing so: namely, that we dont have to waste three precious days of vacation time stuck in a car. In simple terms, most of us believe flying is worth the risk.

Soon, many people might believe the same about nuclear power. Partly this is because of a better understanding of the risks and how we can limit them. But mostly it is because the risk of not cutting global carbon emissions is far greater. No energy source is free of risk, but continuing to burn fossil fuels has become far more dangerous than even the worst-case scenarios for nuclear power. If fact, given what we now know about the numbers of premature deaths caused by airborne pollution, there is an argument to be made that nuclear was always the safer option. Climate change just clinches it.

While we undoubtedly have some lingering cynicism after years of hearing the nuclear industry over-promise and under-deliver, especially on costs and transparency, today much of the green-power industry could be accused of the same: solar power will get cheaper (honest!); a better battery is just around the corner (promise!); this time, people will take conservation seriously (we hope!); installing rooftop solar water heating is sexier than buying a flatscreen TV (really!). The question we must ask is: do we really have time to wait?

For all the warnings that our nuclear power plants are going to explode in a Chernobyl-like disaster, theyve kept chugging along. Yes, they are not perfect, and yes, they are expensive to build, but at last count, they were preventing about 85 million tonnes of CO₂ from entering Canadian skies each year. If we believe the growing body of research that says we may have just 20 years to stabilize emissions, we can’t make wind power our first and only choice. To do so would require many variables to fall into place: finding sites for as many as 100,000 wind turbines, building them, securing rights of way for new transmission lines, and then hoping someone invents a more efficient and longer-lasting battery. There’s no room for error, and that’s a lot of variables, some with potentially staggering price tags, and all of which would have to happen in a very short period of time.

The better solution is to double Canadian nuclear capacity. It could be done on existing sites, and even though it would take 10 to 15 years to build, the grid connections would be simple. The moment we turned on these new plants, Canada’s emissions from electricity drop close to zero (a new nuclear power plant in Saskatchewan or Alberta would be enough to supply Western Canada). Keep building wind turbines and researching solar, but lets not mistake where we want to be in 50 or 100 years with where we need to be in just 10 or 20.

To build these plants does not mean that nuclear is perfect—it is not, and many of its early proponents did more harm than good by claiming that it was. But hard as it may be to admit, we also know that without it, we would be in a much bigger mess than we are in today. Climate change is far too grave a problem to ignore any solution. If we are remotely serious about stopping it, we must give nuclear a fair chance.